Edsel (22 page)

“Hardly unlikely. Wrestling is popular in Russia. They understand it. If they played baseball in Moscow I’d go looking for them at Briggs Stadium. I know exactly whom I’ve approached on this matter, Mr. Minor. If there’s a leak I’ll find it. I already have a good idea where to look.”

“That’s not important. What’s important is you’ve placed your bet on last year’s turn of the wheel. This year no one’s interested in what the commies are up to.”

“John Foster Dulles isn’t no one. J. Edgar Hoover isn’t. I flatter myself that I am not.” He stopped leaning and slid his hands into his coat pockets, leaving the thumbs out. “You’re entirely mistaken about my motives. I’m not some political opportunist trying to hitch my wagon to the current popular notion of what counts. Nor am I some tobacco-plug Tennessee ward heeler poking about under people’s beds hunting for comical little men in black raincoats with big round bombs in their pockets. I’ve seen the enemy at close range and found nothing to laugh at.”

“You mean when you were stationed in Alaska.”

He didn’t seem surprised that I was familiar with his service record. “In the spring when the East Siberian seaports opened, I would watch through fieldglasses as their destroyers patrolled the edge of the Three Mile Limit. They were the best they had, and there were more of them each time. I ask you, Mr. Minor, why were they so concerned about the waters separating the Soviet Union from the United States—their ally—when the enemy lay in the opposite direction?”

“I gave up trying to understand the military mind when Montgomery destroyed the Netherlands trying to protect them from the Nazis.”

“We could use a few of their minds in our military. While we were busy fighting that war, they were getting ready for the next. Are you familiar with Herbert A. Philbrick’s
I Led Three Lives
?”

“I caught a couple of episodes. Richard Carlson’s got to be the dullest leading man this side of Van Johnson.”

“I’m talking about the book, not the television program loosely based upon it. It should be required reading in every public school. During the nine years he worked as an informant for the FBI among the ranks of the American Communist Party, Philbrick discovered that its leaders willfully taught and advocated the overthrow and destruction of the government of the United States by force. They spread their Marxist-Leninist filth in schools and colleges and among groups of well-meaning community-minded citizens who had no idea that through their innocent contributions they were helping to finance and foment violent revolution. In short, Mr. Minor, these gray men and women going about their everyday business in the drab guise of John and Mary Public posed, and continue to pose, a greater danger to the liberties we count sacred than the armed might of Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan combined.”

“And Mussolini’s Italy. Don’t forget the Italians.” I had him now. Whatever public-relations team had worked the makeover on him—and I had participated on the edges of that kind of thing enough times I was appalled not to have spotted it before this—had thrown me at first, but I had been right in my prejudice. Fanatacism I could deal with. Conspiracists spent so much time doubling back on their own logic they mistook insanity for brilliance. You could sell them a refrigerator for the purpose of baking a pie. The only way they would feel insulted would be if you were to offer an explanation.

“Forgive me, Mr. Leadbeater. You must understand that sincerity was the last thing I expected to encounter in a politician’s den.”

He didn’t appear to have heard me. “For all their devious methods, Communists understand simplicity. They prey upon minds that are unable to grasp an abstract thought. Dick divides his apple equally among four friends. Nikita divides the wheat crop in the Ukraine equally among one hundred eighty million comrades. That’s the beauty of wrestling to their plans. There’s a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy is direct and aggressive, the way America has been throughout seven wars. The good guy is sneaky; his way of fighting is complex, his holds difficult to understand and even more difficult to escape. In just that way Russia drew the Nazis deep into its wilderness before closing the trap. And so by compelling the unsuspecting fan to root for the hero’s tangled tactics against the brute honesty of his evil opponent, the Communists slowly and subtly win converts to their unholy cause. It doesn’t matter to them whether it takes years or generations. They waited four hundred years to overthrow the Czar.”

He had begun to frighten me. It wasn’t so much his theories as the casually conversational way he laid out this magoozlum of overcooked
angst
, like the neighborhood know-it-all explaining how radiation worked based on his possession of a glow-in-the-dark watch. When you dissected the translated text of an address by Hitler or Stalin it didn’t go back together, and indeed fell apart at the touch of a reasonably sharp scalpel. What made it work was the delivery; that, and the speaker’s unshakeable conviction that he was saying things that everyone knew were true but lacked the courage and the ability to put them into words everyone could understand. Fifty years ago, even forty, this kind of spellbinder could have seen the limits of his influence from the podium he stood behind, the egg crate he used to lift himself a few inches above the level of the pavement where his listeners stood. Radio and now the cathode ray had swollen those limits beyond even the speaker’s imagination. But the pitiless glare of the television arc light would have done no service to the bug-eyed demagoguery of a Hitler, the foam-flecked doomsaying of a Stalin or a Huey Long, magnifying as it did the ugly distortion of a shouting face. It would have embraced the chiseled chin, rumpled hair, and cool mannerly sociability of this eastern-bred young Turk. His poison would glide down the coaxial cable and spill out into a thousand living rooms like notes from Liberace’s piano, gently, insidiously, challenging you not to hum the tune all the following day. This was a new creature for a new jungle, incalculably dangerous.

I said, “I can see you’ve given this a great deal of thought.”

“Not nearly as much as the people on the other side, nor for nearly as long. Why are you here really, Minor, and who do you represent? I don’t know Henry Ford personally, but from what I’ve heard he wouldn’t send a PR man to discuss politics.” Although he placed no emphasis on the change, there was significance in his having jettisoned “mister.” With it went the gloves.

“He would if he didn’t want to attract attention. It’s a delicate business whenever the public and private sector make contact.”

He stretched an arm across the overcarved desk and snapped the switch on the intercom. “Miss Heimdall, please see if you can get Henry Ford on the line. Try the new Administration Center in Dearborn.” He straightened. “I have no doubt you’ll pardon my suspicion once we have this settled. These days it’s difficult to follow the rules of baseball. Even baseball. Yalta changed everything.”

Not to mention Mickey Mantle. “Cancel that call,” I said.

“Belay that, Miss Heimdall.” He flipped off the intercom and leaned back against the desk, folding his hands in front of him.

“I’m a friend of Anthony Battle’s,” I said. “He hasn’t told anyone else about the conversations you’ve had. He just wanted to ask my advice.”

“I thought as much. That it was Battle, I mean. He’s the only man I’ve approached on this matter who seemed reluctant to cooperate.”

“It isn’t that. He doesn’t know the first thing about Communists or Communism. He thinks Karl Marx is the brother Groucho never talks about.”

“That’s just where the Party finds the best hunting. Among those who haven’t yet made up their minds.”

“He’s a wrestler, not an idealogue. All he wants is to be left alone.”

“He’s an unwitting dupe. I saw that from the first. It doesn’t make him any less dangerous; quite the contrary. The Reds thrive on ignorance. Understand, it’s not Battle I want. If I’m to find the source of the corruption in his profession, I’ll need names. His unwillingness to provide them can only lead me to one conclusion.”

“Most of the people he associates with don’t even have names. They call themselves Bobo and Leaping Larry and the Sheik. Their conversation runs to better holds and improved brands of jockstraps. You tell me how that’s going to save America from the godless horde from the East.”

Leadbeater’s long upper lip skinned back from a pair of abnormally long and sharp canines. No doubt a trip to the orthodontist was in the offing before the November elections. “I offered him a way out. It’s plain he doesn’t want it. Your presence here is evidence enough of that. I’ve yet to hear one good reason why I shouldn’t just go ahead and pull the plug on Mr. Battle.”

“I can give you something better than Reds behind the wainscoting.”

“A clever phrase. I’ll have to remember it. Be more specific.”

“I can lay in your lap the names of people involved in the biggest criminal conspiracy to hit this area since the Ferguson-O’Hara grand jury investigation of 1939.”

His lip came down. Maybe his gums were just drying out. “You were part of that investigation, if I recall my reading. Names, you said?”

“Walter Reuther. Victor Reuther, his brother. The Ballista brothers, Tony and Carlo. And Frankie Orr.”

“Orr’s in Sicily.”

“Detroit Metropolitan Airport takes jets now. Flight time from Palermo to here is less than twelve hours.”

“Federal agents would be waiting when he set down. They’d bundle him aboard the next flight out.”

“Not if he buys his way out of the original deportation.”

“Impossible. That would take millions.”

“I said it was big.”

“Anyone can reel off a list of names, Mr. Minor. And draw up a plot to connect them. You’re a writer, after all.” But the “mister” was back.

“The Reuther brothers have no love for organized crime, particularly when it’s organized by Frankie Orr. The no-necks who roughed him around during the Battle of the Overpass were Frankie’s, on loan to Harry Bennett. That was before Orr found out how much untraceable cash is lying around your typical union strike fund. There are dissenters in the UAW who are only too ready to pipe that cash into Frankie’s pocket in return for a leg up in the union. In 1948 he tried to give them that leg up by shooting Walter. When he survived, an attempt was made on Victor to help him see the light. The only thing that kept Orr from finishing the job was the federal indictment that eventually got him booted out of the country. Now he wants back in. I’ll give you three guesses where he hopes to dig up the working capital.”

“You mentioned the Ballistas. I recommended against subpoenaing them to appear before the Kefauver committee. They’re mouth-breathers, nothing more. They push slots and jukeboxes.”

“These days they’re in the entertainment business. And they’re Frankie’s only link to his old territory.”

“Except for his son Pasquale. Don’t forget Patsy.”

“Why not? Everyone else has. He’s a weakling and cripple, getting along on his father’s name and the Ballista’s muscle.” I caught a flash then of the big party at the Highwayman’s Rest and the sallow youth in evening wear with his crutches leaning against the table next to him. I hadn’t made the connection before. But then the last time I had seen him he was less than seventy-two hours old, fighting for life in an incubator at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Leadbeater was chewing on some mental picture all his own. “I’m interested in your source.”

“Call Anthony Battle and tell him he’s off the hook.”

He chewed some more. “Where can you be reached?”

I gave him my home number. It was finding its way into some interesting address books of late.

“T
HANKS DON’T CUT IT
, Mr. Connie. I already seen Ginny and me in the canned-meat line at the government warehouse. Little Charlie don’t finish school and winds up carrying a hod for fifty cents a hour, just like me and my old man. You done saved the Battles, Mr. Connie. Saying thanks just ain’t near good enough.”

“When you’re out of the woods you can send me a couple of tickets to your next championship bout. Leadbeater hasn’t forgotten about you yet.”

“He sounded like it when he called. He couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me so’s he could stick it in some other sorry son of a bitch.”

Neither could I, but not for the same reason. I can accept gratitude as well as the next man, and better than most, but I hadn’t earned it from the wrestler until I could place evidence in Stuart Leadbeater’s lap to prove that all of southeastern Michigan was in cahoots to put an over-the-hill expatriate mobster back in business. I thanked Battle for calling and cradled the receiver.

Agnes turned over in bed and slid an imperfectly shaved thigh across my groin. The tiny bristles awakened a semblance of life in my aging member, so recently exhausted. She smelled faintly of Chanel, more strongly of me. “That didn’t sound like auto business,” she said sleepily.

“It was, though. Kind of. I keep backing up for a longer head start. I’m so far away now I can’t see what I’m running at.”

“What’s Leadbeater got to do with it?”

“Nothing. Everything. A couple of years ago I read a science fiction story about a group of time travelers who were warned not to step off the path while they were hunting dinosaurs, because if they altered something no one could tell how it might affect history. Someone stepped off anyway and killed a butterfly. When they got back, everything had changed. This would just be another selling job if someone in the Navy Department had assigned Leadbeater to the Philippines instead of Point Barrow.”

“He doesn’t stand a chance of being elected. If that means anything.”

I grinned at the religious picture on the wall opposite the bed, once the property of an acquaintance, long dead. He’d have enjoyed my situation. Not thinking things through had gotten him killed, but it had kept him out of the sort of trouble I spent my life in. “That’s the hell of it,” I said. “Getting him off my back may just clinch the election for him.”

She propped her head up on her elbow. She looked younger with her hair loose around her bare shoulders, and she never looked her age. “You know what your problem is? You spend too much time figuring the angles. I bet if you just went ahead and did your job the way it was described to you when you were hired, you’d come out just as well as if you chased down all the loose cannons. And you’d have a lot fewer gray hairs.”